Who Burned Atlanta?

At 7 a.m. on Nov. 16, 1864, Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman accompanied the last corps of his Union army as it left Atlanta to begin a virtually uncontested “March to the Sea,” which would end in Savannah five weeks later. Three miles outside the city, he stopped for a final look back. “Behind us lay Atlanta smoldering and in ruins, the black smoke rising high in the air and hanging like a pall over the ruined city,” he recalled. Presently a nearby infantry band struck up John Brown’s anthem. “Never … have I heard the chorus of ‘Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!’ done with more spirit.” The men were proud of what they had done.

A little over six months earlier, Sherman and his men had started a campaign that culminated in the capture of Atlanta on Sept. 2, a victory that probably clinched President Abraham Lincoln’s re-election. But their most recent accomplishments were the destruction and civilian depopulation of Atlanta and other North Georgia towns. Under Sherman’s orders, by the end of September nearly all of Atlanta’s residents had been forcibly removed, although most had no place to go.

Estimates of the physical damage Sherman left behind varied. Capt. Orlando Poe, ordered to supervise a limited destruction, estimated that 37 percent of the city was demolished. An Indiana soldier’s diary entry simply stated, “We have utterly destroyed Atlanta.” After Sherman left, Georgia’s governor sent a militia officer named William Howard to prepare an assessment. Howard spent four days systematically mapping every house left standing; within a half-mile radius of the city center, only 400 homes remained, of 3,600.

None of this will be news to anyone who has watched, or read, “Gone With the Wind.” And yet that film has long helped promote a misconception about what, exactly, happened in Atlanta that fall.

The spectacular burning scene in “Gone With the Wind” mistakenly portrays the principal inferno as happening when the Confederates left the city on Sept. 1. It’s true that the rebels demolished parts of the city as they left; once Sherman gained control of all the railroads leading out of Atlanta, Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood had no choice but to try to save his army and evacuate with as many supplies as possible, and destroy what he had to leave behind. Most notable among the items marked for destruction was a reserve supply train consisting of five engines and 81 boxcars, which was idling on double tracks near the town’s eastern edge. Twenty-eight of those cars held munitions. When the train was torched, it created what was likely the largest explosion of the Civil War. Every building for a quarter mile around was damaged or destroyed, including the Atlanta Rolling Mill, railroad roundhouse, arsenal shops and a cannon factory. Nonetheless, outside the border surrounding the train, the Confederate evacuation caused fairly little damage.

The real story of the destruction of Atlanta is more complex. During the preceding siege, from July 20 to Aug. 31, parts of Atlanta were wrecked by fighting. Long trenches were dug by the opposing armies. Buildings were destroyed to provide clear fields of fire and for materials to build fortifications. Then there was Sherman’s indiscriminant five-week bombardment of the city, which started July 20. The day after the shelling began Sherman wired the Union’s chief of staff, Henry W. Halleck, in Washington, “The city seems to have a line around it at an average distance to the center of town of about one-and-a-half miles, but our shot passing over this line will destroy the town.”

The general was aware that women and children would be among the victims. On the third day of the protracted fusillade his chief telegrapher wired Washington: “As I write our heavy artillery is at work, and large fires are burning in Atlanta.” The same day a New York artillerist wrote his wife there were a “great many women and children” who had taken refuge in the city from the surrounding area. During the extended cannonade, Sherman’s artillery fired more than 100,000 projectiles. Civilian casualties are estimated at a couple of dozen killed and scores more wounded.

Still, when Sherman occupied the city in September, it was largely intact. It was only with his departure, two months later, that the real burning began.

Photo

Images from the burning of Atlanta, November 1864.Credit Library of Congress

To be clear, the wholesale destruction of Atlanta was not Sherman’s intention. He had officers draw up a plan to destroy military targets, which included a detailed map marking the structures. No private residences were among them. Captain Poe was selected to execute the plan because it was thought his engineers would be less reliant upon explosives and fire. Still, there was little doubt about the plan’s consequences: Six days earlier, when Poe first heard of the plan, he wrote his superior engineering officer in Washington that by the time his letter arrived, “Atlanta will have ceased to exist.”

The real cause of the subsequent mass destruction was Sherman’s acquiescence to widespread disobedience among his soldiers. Ever since he had been post commander in Memphis, two years earlier, Sherman had advocated a brutal approach to Confederates, both military and civilian. Since he presumed that local guerrillas were responsible for taking pot shots at Mississippi River boats, he ordered that 10 citizens be forcibly removed from the city for every incident along the river. When such an instance occurred in Randolph, Tenn., he destroyed the town, leaving only a single structure standing. Sherman’s attitude quickly filtered down through the ranks, so that by the time they left Atlanta, no orders were necessary; Sherman’s troops simply did what they had been told to do, so many times before.

Atlanta wasn’t the first North Georgia city to be razed that fall. A few days before the march began, Union troops burned Cassville, about 50 miles north of Atlanta. Five days later the manufacturing town of Rome was razed. The following day Sherman wired Maj. Gen. George Thomas in Nashville, “Last night we burned Rome and in two or more days will burn Atlanta.” The next target was the railroad connecting Atlanta to Chattanooga, which had been Sherman’s supply line since early September. The general decided to destroy miles of the line after the last train left Atlanta for the North on Nov. 12. The next day the rail town of Marietta was wrecked.

A new, politically appointed and youthful major named Henry Hitchcock joined Sherman at Marietta. Once shops and homes were caught up in the blaze Hitchcock commented to Sherman: “[The town will] burn down, sir.”

“Yes,” Sherman said. “Can’t be stopped.”

“Was that your intention?”

The general answered indirectly. “Can’t save it … There are men who do this,” pointing to a group of passing soldiers. “Set as many guards as you please, they will slip in and set fire.”

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For several days prior to the Nov. 15 March to the Sea departure, the elements of Sherman’s army north of Atlanta converged on the city, destroying railroad tracks and communities as they approached. By the time they got to the city, demolition had become habitual. Gen. Henry W. Slocum, whose XX Corps occupied Atlanta after its capture, tried to protect private residences. But the provost guards, who could be relied on to carry out such orders, were concentrated downtown.

The first unauthorized fires started on Nov. 11 near the edge of town. The next morning Slocum offered a $500 reward for the capture of the arsonists, but it was never collected. By Nov. 13, when an Illinois unit marched into Atlanta, a captain in the unit wrote in his diary, “The smoke almost blinded us.” By Nov. 15, the city was on fire everywhere. By 3 p.m., officers who were distributing supplies at the commissary invited soldiers to simply take whatever they needed, because the out-of-control fires would inevitably consume the facility.

One Michigan sergeant conceded getting swept up in the inflammatory madness, even though he knew it was unauthorized: “As I was about to fire one place a little girl about ten years old came to me and said, ‘Mr. Soldier you would not burn our house would you? If you did where would we live?’ She looked at me with such a pleading look that … I dropped the torch and walked away.”

Starting with Sherman himself, many later justified the burning as military necessity. During the night of 15th, as the fire was in progress, Major Hitchcock overheard Sherman say that Atlanta deserved to be demolished because of its manufacturing capacity for military articles. The same night an Indiana sergeant wrote in his diary, “The entire city was destroyed [but] for a few occupied houses. It reminds me of the destruction of Babylon … because of the wickedness of her people.”

Others falsely minimized the damage. In his memoirs, Sherman speciously claimed “the fire did not reach … the great mass of dwelling houses.” But in a congratulatory order to his troops after arriving in Savannah, he wrote, “We quietly and deliberately destroyed Atlanta.”

Still others accepted the reality of unauthorized burning, but incorrectly claimed it was accidental, or attributed it to impersonal factors. The wind did it. Too many soldiers discovered hidden liquor caches. The fiery march through communities north of Atlanta gave soldiers the impression that the city was to get the same treatment.

Perhaps the most widely accepted justification was the inherent cruelty of war. When a society accepts war as intrinsically cruel, those involved in wartime cruelties are exonerated. Again, Sherman previously set the tone when he responded to the Atlanta City Council’s petition that he rescind his September order requiring nearly all civilians to evacuate:

[I] shall not revoke my orders because they were not designed for the humanities of the case … War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it … Now you must go and take with you the old and feeble … and build for them … proper habitations to shield them against the [approaching winter] weather.

But not all Union soldiers were satisfied with excuses. A Wisconsin private wrote, “I believe this destruction of private property in Atlanta was entirely unnecessary and therefore … disgraceful. … The cruelties practiced on this campaign toward citizens have been enough to blast a more sacred cause than ours. … There certainly is a lack of discipline.”

Partly because most of the source documents about Sherman’s Atlanta burning are the official records of the federal armies, letters and diaries of Union soldiers, and reports in Northern publications, the story is often distorted. Since no Confederate units were present, and only a few sporadically nearby, there were few Confederate reports during the November 1864 inferno. Instead, historians must look to other primary sources, such as Southern newspapers, Georgia state documents, and civilian memoirs, diaries and letters. Their words tell a different version than the corresponding remarks of Union soldiers and newspapers.

Eventually, Sherman’s soldiers had little wish to write about the events of the first half of November 1864, because there was little to inspire pride. Sherman wrote almost nothing about Atlanta’s Nov. 15-16 blaze in his memoirs (beyond claiming that “the great majority of dwellings” were spared).

While Sherman never ordered the wholesale burning of Atlanta, he did little to stop many of his increasingly undisciplined soldiers from escalating targeted destruction into arson and rioting. It is difficult to avoid concluding that he arranged matters so that he could deny responsibility if Atlanta’s destruction became morally condemned, but accept credit if it was celebrated.

Phil Leigh is the author of two Civil War books​, an annotated and illustrated version of the memoirs of Confederate Private Sam Watkins entitled ​”​Co. Aytch​” and ​”​Trading With the Enemy,​”​ which is about intersectional wartime commerce between the North and South. He is currently writing a third book, ​”​Civil War Scandals and Controversies.​”​

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